Remembered Coast
October 22, 2024 at 03:30PM
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Zining Mok | Longreads | October 22, 2024 | 3,413 words (12 minutes)
When my grandmother died, two years ago now, my father suggested we scatter her ashes at sea. She came by sea, let her go, too, by sea. I imagined the matter of her body loosened into water. We would have liked that, my father and I. We would have liked the whole ocean to become her memorial, would have liked to be reminded of her presence whenever we’re by the shore, regardless of where we are in the world. But COVID made it unfeasible, so now when I stand at the ocean’s edge I am reminded not of her memory, but her absence.
My grandmother would probably have hated the idea of a sea burial. Unlike me, she was not one given to romantic notions, nor was she fond of the sea. The beach was a dangerous place, she had always insisted. Restless spirits and ravenous ghosts roamed there, in the waters, looking to pull unsuspecting humans into the netherworld.
As a young woman, my grandmother had spent weeks afloat at sea, cramped into a ship with little food and much sickness. This I pieced together from her terse answers to my relentless questioning one day, back when I was still too young for school. I was at that age when you begin to wonder where you come from, and unlike me—“picked out from the trash,” according to my mother, who was avoiding a conversation about where babies come from—my grandmother had a clear origin. Born in China, she had traveled by ship to Singapore, where we now lived. This I already knew, but it strikes me now that I was looking not for an answer but for a story, in fact a history, of how we each came to be.
What was it like? I asked. At my question, my grandmother looked away. I imagined the mega cruise ship my parents, my brothers, and I had vacationed on, the little round windows in our cabin, the sprawling buffets with endless desserts.
She had boarded from Swatow, she said. The ship was filthy, the food dreadful. She had slept on the floor—yes, the floor—alongside the other passengers.
We spoke in Teochew, the only language my grandmother spoke, but I can no longer remember what it might have sounded like. A memory is a strange thing. “Retrieval” is a misnomer, for one does not retrieve a memory as one does a ball: it is neither stable nor something formed in the past, but something recoded each time you remember it, such that this memory, though encoded in Teochew, because of the number of times I have attempted to write about it, can now be retrieved only in English.
And in English, what I remember my grandmother saying next is this: Onboard, you tried not to get sick. If you got sick, you tried to hide it.
What if you could not hide it?
If you could not hide it, she repeated, you got thrown overboard.
They just throw you into the sea? I asked, incredulous.
Yes.
Throughout the years, as I moved away, grew up, began to forget my Teochew, I have never forgotten this detail. But this detail I will never forget is also the one that has me doubting my memory. Not once have I heard this mentioned outside of that afternoon, not by my grandmother or my parents, my textbooks or my teachers.
Now an adult, I piece together fragments of personal memory with what I know about history, colonialism, passages by sea. Searching for descriptions of passages that approximate my grandmother’s in oral history archives, newspaper archives, and academic articles, I learn that she was what’s called a “deck passenger.” Once found, this phrase became for me a map, and I set about wandering in the sea of records, recollecting. Mostly what I find are details: the capacity of a new steamer, designed to carry 20 first-class and 52 second-class passengers in staterooms, 28 third-class passengers in berths in the poop deck, and 900 passengers in spaces unspecified. The wobbling of another ship, at the weight of over a thousand passengers and hordes of packages, stacked up to the awnings, stuffed above the lifeboats, piled even onto the anchor deck, preventing its use. Inevitably I would find myself lost in a fog of minutiae, but again and again I return for more, until, one day, miraculously, the fog shifts.
Miscellany constellates, arranging itself into snapshots of a probable past. Snapshot one: on the eve of leaving home, my grandmother, recalling stories of pirates and thieves, sews her few valuables into the waist of her pants. Two: out on the main deck, below the canvas that ripples and snaps in the wind, she lies on a straw mat, nursing her seasickness. Three: in the stale air of the tween decks, my grandmother, a young woman who has just survived the Second World War, plays four color cards with other women in an enclave constructed with their belongings. Four: after weeks of sailing, she disembarks not at Singapore’s mainland but at Saint John’s Island, where she is screened for smallpox and cholera. Beached there between her past and her future, she spends her days of quarantine thinking of all she has left behind—everything and everyone she knows, but also the Chinese Civil War, and hopefully the days of eating only tapioca—sailing, even then, toward some kind of unknown.
By the time I was born, the beach was no longer the terrible in-between place it used to be for migrants freshly abandoned ashore. It seemed that even Saint John’s Island—which at one point was one of the world’s largest quarantine stations—had forgotten its own history as, over the years, it morphed into a political prison, a rehab center, and, in 1976, a popular destination for a quick camping getaway. Today, Saint John’s Island boasts a Google rating of 4.5 stars. Popular activities include guided nature walks, drinking on private yachts, and lounging on a quiet beach on neighboring Lazarus Island, which had once been the burial ground of those who died in quarantine.
It is in this forgetful world that I first encountered the beach, and at the beach where I formed some of my earliest memories: along the moving edge of water, my mother and I search for seashells as, behind us, our footprints slowly disappear. Floating in the safety of my father’s arms, I steal sips of seawater, shocked by salt. Hand-in-hand, my older brothers and I stand in waters up to my neck, watching a wave roll toward us. Jump! they scream, then terror gives way to exhilaration as we surf, for a moment, weightless on the back of a wave, which soon deposits us gently back to shore. Squinting at the horizon from shore, I imagined what lay beyond in the “overseas.” Indonesia was on the other side of the Singapore Strait, but in my imagination I was looking toward America, where I had promised my grandmother I would one day go to college.
Briefly afloat, then back to land, back to the beach of my childhood, back to East Coast Beach Park, back home to Singapore’s southeastern coasts. On my first return as an adult, I found myself surprised by just how unremarkable it all is, this modest stretch of coarse sand sandwiched between the tree-lined, concrete sidewalks and the gray sea, the horizon crowded with cargo ships. And yet, this beach had been for me a place of enchantment. It was the beach in my parents’ wedding photos, where my grandfather, who died the year I was born, had played with his grandchildren, and where I choreographed, with memories of this past, my future: there, at the top of the breakwater, my date and I would watch the sunset as the waves crashed upon the rocks. Here, somewhere along this horizontal strip of sand, my parents would one day play with my children.
Building a sandcastle has no stakes: if it turns out poorly, you can smooth it into a clean slate. Perhaps I knew, even then, that sand is not simply material, but the embodiment of limitless possibility, the very substance of dreams.
In this way, the beach was for me a portal into worlds both future and past. It took on even greater meaning when I moved away from home at 13. Each time I returned for a visit, I found myself washed over with a fresh wave of grief. The grief of lost friendships, a new distance felt between my brothers and me. The grief of losing my childhood home, and the grief of seeing the little hill on which my childhood home stands gradually parceled out and excavated to make way for new housing estates. The grief, most of all, of losing my Teochew, my ability to communicate with my grandmother, whose memories were quickly fraying. Afloat on this small sea of loss, I found myself yearning for the stable shores of my childhood beach as I grew increasingly alienated from the place I call home.
A few days after my grandmother’s funeral, my father and I are sitting at East Coast Park in silence. The beach buzzes with life outside our little circle of grief. The sun now low, around us there is picnicking, barbequing, swimming, sandcastle building, kite-flying, and tandem biking—all motions I have performed many times prior, but today my body feels alone in the crowd. Today, instead, my body shivers from my grandmother’s memories of being at sea, and I wonder how my family’s relationship to the beach and sea could have changed in the span of a single generation.
For one, East Coast Park didn’t always exist. Where my father and I are now sitting on a concrete bench, there once were kelongs, villages, the sea. Shorelines have always been in flux. There is the constant ebb and flow of the waves, the revelation and submergence of the intertidals at different times of day, the rising sea levels. There is also the redrawing of an island’s outlines by land reclamation: the transformation of an area of water into new land, often by filling the area with sand.
Plans to reclaim this beach park were first announced a year before Singapore’s independence in 1964, when my father was a child. As a young man, my father had sneaked onto this beach when it was still being reclaimed, alongside a new expressway, a new residential suburb planned for 250,000 people, and other “modern amenities” like parks and entertainment complexes to match the state’s endeavor for a higher standard of living. This project, which came to be known as the Great Reclamation, eventually snowballed into a 30-year project, and by its end our nation had morphed from a middle- to a high-income country.
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My father had grown up in the change, while I was born after it, into a Singapore where East Coast Park was solid, self-evident. In fact, the park felt so natural to me that I would find out it was reclaimed only as a young adult, via a circuitous route, making it all the way to California before I could remember what had all along made up the world of my childhood. By then, true to the promise I’d made my grandmother, I found myself at an American college, reading Cadillac Desert. In it, Marc Reisner exposes the lushness of the California desert as a “beautiful fraud” constructed by a water infrastructure rapidly depleting the West’s water. “In the West, it is said, water flows uphill towards money,” he writes. To meet the demands of Los Angeles and its surrounding counties, water travels over 400 miles from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, climbing, at one point, 2,000 feet up the Tehachapi Mountains; water is also redirected from the Colorado River, flowing 242 miles down the aqueduct, a practice amounting to “water imperialism” against other US states and Mexico.
After reading Reisner, I began to see in my memories of California a complex web of pipes conducting water below the surface, and the saturated colors of the golden state lost some of their luster. My mind turned then to Singapore. What lurked here, beyond the surface of my memories? Not knowing what I would find, I dug into Singapore’s urban development until I came across a statistic that gave me pause.
Through compulsive filling and redrawing, Singapore had increased its land area by almost 25% since its independence in 1965. Of my childhood world, this beach park is not the sole place built on reclaimed land. So was my school; the library I visited each week; the bakery from which the scent of pandan waffles wafted daily; the Changi Airport, where I used to watch fish fin through coral in an aquarium while waiting for my father to return from his business trips; even the expressway my mother sped down from the airport to home, lined with rain trees that had always seemed so majestic, so old.
After learning these facts, I felt the ground beneath me shift. For a while, East Coast Park had been nothing more than a fantasy, a “supposition,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “on no solid grounds.” I returned to the archives, searching, once again, for a history of how we came to be. To build the fantasy that became my world, the authorities excavated earth from 870 acres of hills that used to undulate in Bedok and Siglap, in the east of Singapore. The small hill on which my childhood home stood was once part of this bigger formation, sediment deposited over hundreds of thousands of years by a braided river that had flowed in the Pleistocene. Before my family settled there, many had already built their lives on these hills in villages, vegetable farms, and coconut and rambutan plantations, a mythic topography I will never know.
After the people were resettled, these storied lands were then reduced to fill material by machines called earthmovers. In the archives, I find two photographs that fill me with both marvel and grief. In one, a bucket-wheel excavator makes gash after gash in the face of a hill; in another, hillcut soil flows along an eight-mile-long conveyor belt and is spread across newly reclaimed land, desolate and bright red. Working round the clock, the earthmovers moved soil toward the sea at 400 truckloads per hour, filling one acre of land each day, rearranging, by the alchemy of modernity, processed hill into a new singularity.
By the time I was born, the beach was no longer the terrible in-between place it used to be for migrants freshly abandoned ashore.
I read article after article as if watching a time lapse of my reality come into being. On ground that would become this very park, turf advances quickly across bulldozed land, and 10,000 saplings stake their young claims on the new territory. Luxury seaside resorts mushroom along the coastline. A swimming lagoon the size of 40 Olympic pools materializes. These documents painted, on the blank slate of reclaimed land, pictures of a luxurious, modern, and recreational life by the ocean. Years later, my family would come to live out this script. At the beach, we were the picture of a perfect Singaporean family. While my brothers swam, my father drank Tiger Beer, and my mother napped in the sun, I sat on the sand with my sandcastle molds, envisioning fanciful designs to house imagined princesses.
I had a visual imagination but no sculpting skills; my molds were an assortment of plastic boxes and chipped Styrofoam cups. Each time I completed a sandcastle, I would feel an immediate sense of disappointment. My inability to externalize the image in my mind frustrated me, but even then I couldn’t stop building them, couldn’t stop packing sand into cups, couldn’t stop breaking new ground for my next draft, as if the next would be different, would somehow give form to the castle of my imagination. Building a sandcastle has no stakes: if it turns out poorly, you can smooth it into a clean slate. Perhaps I knew, even then, that sand is not simply material, but the embodiment of limitless possibility, the very substance of dreams.
This is the world I grew up in, a world in which I could be anything I dreamed and do whatever I dreamed of doing, as long as I had the skill. A world in which there were no real consequences; an ahistorical world, where things could be easily reset for the building of new dreams.
My grandmother, I suspect, had never suffered from this ahistorical delusion. As a child, I imagined her as a dreamy young woman preoccupied with elaborate dreams of her future in Singapore, just as I dreamt then of studying in America, the land of the free. But I think now that she must have been keenly aware that her agency was historically contingent. Watching the sun set as I sit at the beach with my father, I remember the story that he had told me a year ago about my grandparents’ migration.
My father had pieced the story together after chancing upon a letter in my grandfather’s possession. When the Second World War ended and the Chinese Civil War recommenced, my great-grandmother decided it would be prudent to spread her eggs across different baskets. And so it was decided: of her two sons who were both in Singapore, one would return to China, while the other, my grandfather, would remain and be joined by my grandmother. Not long after she arrived, the Chinese borders closed, and my grandparents would not return to their birthplace until the ’90s.
It was night when my father told me this story, and the air felt humid with the weight of my great-grandmother’s arbitrary, momentous decision. A hedge: to stay and live through yet another war, or to leave and sail to what was then a crown colony of an empire that my grandparents, having grown up just outside the treaty port of Swatow, must have loathed. So this, then, was the deeper history of how my family came to be. I remember the curtain billowing into my parents’ room then, as if the wind, too, was bringing us secrets from afar.
My mind turned then to Singapore. What lurked here, beyond the surface of my memories?
Now, the sea breeze brings us the smell of salt and decay. I am mulling, still, on the idea of a sea burial and our changed relationship to these waters. Unlike me, my grandmother knew firsthand that the sea is foremost a place of haunting, the port city one of imperial interest, and the beach one of arrivals and a site of massacres, one of which my grandfather narrowly escaped in WWII. There is none of that history here, this being a reclaimed beach on which we have built the sandcastles of our dreams.
But the concept of a tabula rasa is only the fantasy of reclamation, for even this beach is not exempt from imperial history. In 1962, sand-washing operations turned up human remains. Years of exhuming this “Valley of Tears” unearthed more than 50 mass graves in the red hills of Bedok and Siglap, recovering the remains of tens of thousands of victims of the Sook Ching massacre.
And later, when this land had been reclaimed, it would become implicated in yet another war. In 1970, a $1 million jetty was specially built on this newly reclaimed ground to receive US military scrap and surplus equipment from the Vietnam War. While the scrap was melted in foundries, the equipment was cleared over 14 auctions, which generated $10 million for the US Treasury. Today, no memory trace remains at this jetty, which has since become a popular angling spot.
At day’s end, the sun long gone, my father and I begin to make our way home. We walk toward one of the many underpasses below the expressway that take us from East Coast Park to the old shoreline. We walk along this remembered coast before turning inland. I had hoped to scatter her ashes in the sea so we could go to the beach whenever we liked, my father says as we walk past the ghosts of hills toward home. But where we scattered her ashes, in that little garden . . . we’ll never go back. My family had left immediately after the ritual, there being nothing much in the garden besides a small ash scattering lane. I wondered how often the authorities cleared the lanes to make space for new ash, and where the old ash inevitably went.
In life, my grandmother had continued moving from place to place after arriving in Singapore, caught in the decades-long urban rejuvenation that made it what it is today. In death, her ashes have settled at the one remaining cemetery in the country, the rest having been exhumed and redeveloped—reclaimed, if you will—to build the fantasies of the living.
Zining Mok is obsessed with random things: orchids, arabesques, sand. Her first book, The Orchid Folios, was shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize (Poetry). She edits at Ethos Books and is at work on an essay collection, The Earthmovers.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/22/remembered-coast-singapore-sand-sea-reclamation/
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